Visa’s Secure Credential Framework (SCF) is designed to increase merchant, issuer, and acquirer adoption of Network Tokens - digital identifiers used to supply symbolic placeholder data instead of the primary account number (PAN) in all parts of the payment chain.
In 2025, Visa will update the SCF to further incentivize issuers to keep credentials associated with Network Tokens up to date. They are also revising their existing Network Token incentive fees in October for acquirers to drive increased acceptance in the Europe region.
In a recent circular published on October 3, Visa reports that it has observed an increase of over 5% and a reduction of fraud by 50% where merchants use 3D Secure authentication and Network Tokenization, compared to payments made with unauthenticated primary account numbers (PANs).
Visa also reports that due in part to the measures introduced under the SCF, almost half of European ecommerce transactions now originate from a Network Token. Furthermore, over 99% of European issuer Bank Identification Numbers (BINs) are now ready to respond to Network Token requests, with almost 95% of issuers now provisioning tokens.
Visa expects issuers to maintain good procedures for out-of-date credentials associated with Network Tokens.
Visa plans to introduce new issuer incentive fees in April 2025. These will further incentivize issuers to keep credentials associated with a Network Token up-to-date, helping to further increase the benefits of Network Tokens in avoiding customer churn due to expired account details.
With these measures in place, Visa plans to increase its Acquirer SCF Integrity Fee effective October 1, 2025. Where an acquirer processes a transaction without a Network Token or EMV 3D Secure, the transaction will now incur an increased fee of 0.075%.
Note that Card Payouts and Mail-Order Telephone-Order (MOTO) transactions are exempt from the Acquirer SCF Integrity Fee, except for when MOTO is used to establish a future standing instruction Merchant Initiated Transaction. You can find full details of this fee in our pricing and interchange update.
Network Tokens offer significant benefits to schemes, issuers, acquirers, and merchants, in terms of better approval rates, lower costs, reduced fraud, and an improved payment experience for cardholders.
In the long term we expect the card schemes to move towards full adoption of Network Tokens across all regions. At Checkout.com, we have an opt-in managed network token solution that can automatically share a Network Token on your behalf with Visa and Mastercard that can be used as part of a multi-PSP environment.
If you haven’t switched to Network Tokens already, we strongly recommend reviewing the increased SCF fees to understand how these may affect your payment processing costs. If you’d like to find out more about our Network Token solution, please contact your Account Manager or raise a support request and we’ll be happy to help.
Tom is the Merchant Communications leader for Checkout.com, responsible for keeping merchants aware of product changes, scheme updates, and regulations. With 12 years of payments industry experience, Tom also writes blogs on general industry topics across all the solutions we offer.
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